When teenagers leaving the nest comes with a flight around the mountain

For editor Ilona Hanne, watching her teenage son take flight, in a plane expertly flown by his friend, was a lesson in letting go. Photo / Ilona Hanne

OPINION:

It’s been a stressful week for this mother of teenagers, and if there is one conclusion I can draw, it is this: I am not a mother bird.

Mother birds, so years of watching David Attenborough documentaries tell me, are heartless beasts. Some bird breeds anyway. When they feel their chicks are ready to fly, they (quite literally) push them out of the nest. It’s called fledging apparently, and while ornithologists may say this is a crucial part of the young bird’s development, my maternal brain disagrees.

With my eldest teenager about to head off to university in a few days, it might seem this column is talking about mothers watching their young take flight into the world or, you know, drop to their doom below, hopefully in a figurative sense only. And yes, there is certainly a sense of wondering if said teenager is ready to face the big wide world outside of Taranaki.

But actually, on Thursday morning, said teenager did, literally not figuratively, take flight, and I was doing anything but pushing him out of the nest/cockpit.

While it feels like only yesterday that my biggest parenting conundrum was about letting a child walk home from school alone for the first time, clearly my children are growing up, because this week the eldest casually asked me if he could “go fly around the mountain with a friend”.

His friend, who is an incredibly responsible young man, has his pilot’s licence and so had suggested a fun flight before they head off to university.

Given my son is 18, he and his friend are both sensible, mature teenagers who I know aren’t going to do stupid things, the answer was always going to be yes, but it took me a while to get that three-letter word out.

My first thought was why couldn’t my son just do it and tell me after? While I am appreciative of being asked, I couldn’t help but yearn for a time when teenagers lived in a less communicative era when it came to how they might spend those endless summer days between school end and university start. It was easier for mothers then, I reckon.

Anyway, I did say yes and so on Thursday last week my son and his friend took to the skies and flew around our beautiful maunga.

It was an hour-long flight, a very, very long hour I might add, and my fingernails may never be the same again, but of course they had a great time, landed safely and probably spent half the flight time rolling their eyes on the subject of stressed mothers who worry over nothing.

In my defence, it hadn’t been the only stress of the day however, as Thursday was also the day NZQA scholarship results came out, meaning a high-stress hour or so in the morning online waiting for the all-important (to those of us paying the uni hall bill) results and monetary awards to be released.

As my son and I waited for the website to refresh for the thousandth time (or possibly fourth, I do tend to exaggerate when I am stressed), it struck me that just like watching a (very small) plane take off, there was nothing I could do to control the outcome.

I did not sit the scholarship exams, and I am not piloting the plane. While Thursday’s jaunt around the maunga was thanks to his friend’s piloting skills, generally speaking my son is now piloting his own course in life. I can’t control or influence the outcomes, and I can’t set the course.

My time for all that was in the first 18 years, while his feathers were growing, so to speak. Now it’s his time to do it his way, whether his mother is ready or not. (On the bright side, just as the plane landed perfectly, the exam results did too, so maybe he really is ready.)

I’m no longer in the driving seat, or cockpit, of his life, instead, I have to sit back and watch as he takes flight, literally and figuratively. I may not have pushed him out of the nest, but regardless, he’s leaving it.

Unlike my feathered friends, however, I shall keep the nest ready, just in case the teenager needs to return for a day or three, or with a laundry load or two.